Ivan Vladimirov is considered a Soviet artist. He had government awards, among his works there is a portrait of the "leader". But his main legacy is the illustrations of the Civil War. They are given "ideologically correct" names, the cycle includes several anti-white drawings (by the way, noticeably inferior to the rest - the author obviously did not draw them from the heart), but everything else is such a denunciation of Bolshevism that it is even surprising how blind the "comrades" were. And the denunciation is that Vladimirov, a documentary artist, simply displayed what he saw, and the Bolsheviks in his drawings turned out to be who they were - gopniks who mocked people. "A real artist must be truthful." In these drawings, Vladimirov was truthful and, thanks to him, we have an exceptional pictorial chronicle of the era.

Russia: the realities of revolution and civil war through the eyes of the artist Ivan Vladimirov (part 1)

A selection of paintings The battle painter Ivan Alekseevich Vladimirov (1869 - 1947) is known for his cycles of works dedicated to the Russo-Japanese War, the 1905 Revolution and the First World War. But the most expressive and realistic was the cycle of his documentary sketches of 1917-1918. During this period, he worked in the Petrograd police, actively participated in its daily activities and made his sketches not from someone else's words, but from the very essence of living nature. It is thanks to this that Vladimirov’s paintings of this period of time are striking in their truthfulness and display of various not very attractive aspects of the life of that era. Unfortunately, later the artist changed his principles and turned into a completely ordinary battle painter, who exchanged his talent and began to write in the style of imitative socialist realism (to serve the interests of the Soviet leaders). To enlarge any of the images you like, click on it with the mouse. liquor store raid

Capture of the Winter Palace

Down with the eagle

Arrest of generals

Escort of prisoners

From their homes (Peasants take away property from the lord's estates and go to the city in search of a better life)

Agitator

Prodrazverstka (requisition)

Interrogation in the Committee of the Poor

Capture of White Guard spies

Peasant uprising on the estate of Prince Shakhovsky

Execution of peasants by White Cossacks

Capture of Wrangel tanks by the Red Army near Kakhovka

The flight of the bourgeoisie from Novorossiysk in 1920

In the cellars of the Cheka (1919)

Burning of eagles and royal portraits (1917)

Petrograd. Relocation of an evicted family (1917 - 1922)

Russian clergy in forced labor (1919)
Butchering a dead horse (1919)

Search for food in the garbage pit (1919)

Famine in the streets of Petrograd (1918)

Former tsarist officials in forced labor (1920)

Night looting of a wagon with help from the Red Cross (1922)

Requisition of church property in Petrograd (1922)

In Search of the Runaway Fist (1920)

Amusement of Teenagers in the Imperial Garden of Petrograd (1921)

In fiction

Babel I. Cavalry (1926)

· Bulgakov. M. "White Guard" (1924)

Ostrovsky N. "How the steel was tempered" (1934)

Sholokhov. M. " Quiet Don» (1926-1940)

Serafimovich A. "Iron Stream" (1924)

Tolstoy A. "The Adventure of Nevzorov, or Ibicus" (1924)

Tolstoy A. "Walking through the agony" (1922-1941)

Fadeev A. "Defeat" (1927)

Furmanov D. "Chapaev" (1923)

The book consists of 38 short stories, which are sketches of the life and life of the First Cavalry Army, united by single heroes and the time of the story. The book in a rather harsh and unsightly form shows the characters of Russian revolutionaries, their lack of education and cruelty, which contrasts sharply with the character of the main character, the educated correspondent Kirill Lyutov, whose image is quite closely connected with the image of Babel himself. Some episodes of the work are autobiographical. A striking feature of the story is that the main character has Jewish roots (although he bears the Russian surname Lyutov). The issue of the persecution of Jews before and during the civil war is given a special place in the book.

"White Guard"- Mikhail Bulgakov's first novel. The events of the Civil War at the end of 1918 are described; The action takes place in Ukraine. The action of the novel takes place in 1918, when the Germans who occupied Ukraine leave the City, and Petliura's troops capture it. The heroes - Aleksey Turbin (28 years old), Elena Turbina - Talberg (24 years old) and Nikolka (17 years old) - are involved in the cycle of military and political events. The city (in which Kyiv is easily guessed) is occupied by the German army. As a result of the signing of the Brest Peace, it does not fall under the rule of the Bolsheviks and becomes a refuge for many Russian intellectuals and military men who flee the RSFSR. Officer combat organizations are being created in the city under the auspices of the hetman - an ally of the Germans, recent enemies. Petliura's army advances on the City. By the time of the events of the novel, the Compiègne truce has been concluded and the Germans are preparing to leave the City. In fact, only volunteers defend him from Petliura. Realizing the complexity of their situation, they console themselves with rumors about the approach of French troops, who allegedly landed in Odessa (in accordance with the terms of the armistice, they had the right to occupy the occupied territories of Russia up to the Vistula in the west). Residents of the city - Alexei (front-line soldier, military doctor) and Nikolka Turbina volunteer to join the city's defenders, and Elena protects the house, which becomes a refuge for officers of the Russian army. Since it is impossible to defend the city on its own, the hetman's command and administration leave it to its fate and leave with the Germans (the hetman himself disguises himself as a wounded German officer). Volunteers - Russian officers and cadets unsuccessfully defend the City without command against superior enemy forces (the author created a brilliant heroic image of Colonel Nai-Tours). Some commanders, realizing the futility of resistance, send their fighters home, others actively organize resistance and perish along with their subordinates. Petlyura occupies the City, arranges a magnificent parade, but after a few months he is forced to surrender it to the Bolsheviks. Main character- Aleksey Turbin - faithful to his duty, tries to join his unit (not knowing that it was dissolved), enters into battle with the Petliurists, gets wounded and, by chance, finds love in the face of a woman who saves him from the persecution of enemies. The social cataclysm exposes the characters - someone runs, someone prefers death in battle. The people as a whole accept the new government (Petlyura) and, after her arrival, demonstrate hostility towards the officers.

"As the Steel Was Tempered"- an autobiographical novel by the Soviet writer Nikolai Alekseevich Ostrovsky (1932). The book is written in the style of socialist realism. The novel tells about the fate of the young revolutionary Pavka (Paul) Korchagin, who defended the gains of Soviet power in the Civil War. Ostrovsky Nikolay Alekseevich. Born into a working class family. In July 1919 he joined the Komsomol and went to the front as a volunteer. He fought in parts of the cavalry brigade of G. I. Kotovsky and the 1st Cavalry Army. In August 1920 he was seriously wounded. Since 1927, O. was bedridden by a severe progressive illness; in 1928 he lost his sight. Mobilizing all mental strength, O. fought for life, engaged in self-education. Blind, motionless, he created the book "How the steel was tempered." The image of the protagonist of the novel "How the Steel Was Tempered" - Pavel Korchagin - is autobiographical. Using the right to fiction, the writer talentedly rethought personal impressions, documents, creating paintings and images of wide artistic significance. The novel conveys the revolutionary impulse of the people, a particle of which Korchagin feels himself to be. For many generations of Soviet youth, for advanced youth circles abroad, Korchagin became a moral model. The novel played a mobilizing role during the Great Patriotic War 1941-45 and during the days of peaceful construction.

Quiet Don" - epic novel by Mikhail Sholokhov in 4 volumes. Volumes 1-3 were written from 1926 to 1928, volume 4 was completed in 1940. One of the most significant works of Russian literature of the 20th century, depicting a broad panorama of the life of the Don Cossacks during the First World War, the revolutionary events of 1917 and the civil war in Russia. Most of the action of the novel takes place in the village of Tatarsky in the village of Vyoshenskaya approximately between 1912 and 1922. In the center of the plot is the life of the Cossack Melekhov family, which went through the First World War and the Civil War. The Melekhovs experienced a lot with the farmers and with all the Don Cossacks in these troubled years. From a strong and prosperous family, by the end of the novel, Grigory Melekhov, his son Misha and sister Dunya remain alive. The protagonist of the book, Grigory Melekhov, is a peasant, a Cossack, an officer who has risen from the ranks. The historical turning point, which completely changed the ancient way of the Don Cossacks, coincided with a tragic turning point in his personal life. Grigory cannot understand with whom he should stay: with the Reds, or with the Whites. Melekhov, by virtue of his natural abilities, first rises from ordinary Cossacks to the rank of officer, and then to the position of general (commanders an insurgent division in the Civil War), but his military career was not destined to take shape. Melekhov also rushes between two women: his initially unloved wife Natalya, feelings for whom woke up only after the birth of the children of Polyushka and Mishatka, and Aksinya Astakhova, Grigory's first and strongest love. And he couldn't keep both women. At the end of the book, Gregory abandons everything and returns home to the only son left of the entire Melekhov family and to his native land. The novel contains a description of the life and way of life of the peasants at the beginning of the 20th century: rituals and traditions characteristic of the Don Cossacks. The role of the Cossacks in hostilities, anti-Soviet uprisings and their suppression, the formation of Soviet power in the village of Vyoshenskaya are described in detail. Sholokhov worked on the novel Quiet Flows the Don for 15 years, work on the novel Virgin Soil Upturned lasted for 30 years (the first book was published in 1932, the second in 1960). In The Quiet Don (1928-40), Sholokhov explores the theme of personality in history, creates pictures of a national tragedy that destroyed the entire way of people's life. The Quiet Flows the Don is a large-scale work with more than 600 characters. The action of the novel covers ten years (from May 1912 to March 1922), these are the years of the imperialist war, the February and October revolutions and the Civil War. The events of history, a holistic image of the era Sholokhov traces through the fate of the heroes: Cossacks, farmers, workers and warriors living on the Tatar farm, on the high bank of the Don. The fates of these people reflected social changes, changes in consciousness, life, psychology. The core of the book is the history of the Melekhov family. Portraying the truth-seeker Grigory Melekhov, Sholokhov reveals the confrontation between the natural person and social cataclysms. Gregory appears as a natural person, an uncompromising personality who does not accept half-truths. The civil war, the revolution, the split world in two throw it into a bloody mess, turn it into a meat grinder of civil strife, atrocities both on the part of the Reds and on the part of the Whites. The innate sense of freedom, honor, dignity will not allow him to bend his back either before the white generals or before the red commissars. The tragedy of Grigory Melekhov is the tragedy of an honest man in a tragically torn world. The finale of the novel is Grigory's departure from the deserters hiding in anticipation of an amnesty, returning to his native kuren. On the banks of the Don, Grigory will throw a rifle, a revolver into the water; it is a symbolic gesture. The novel organically includes the old Cossack songs “How are you, father, the glorious quiet Don” and “Oh you, our father the quiet Don”, taken epigraphs to the 1st and 3rd books of the novel, they appeal to the moral ideas of the people. The Quiet Don contains about 250 descriptions of nature, emphasizing the eternal triumph of life itself, the priority of natural values.
During the years of the “thaw”, Sholokhov published the story “The Fate of a Man” (1956), which became a turning point in prose about the war. With this story, Sholokhov managed to reverse the barbaric cruelty of the system in relation to many thousands of soldiers who, against their will, found themselves in fascist captivity. In a small work, Sholokhov managed to achieve the image of a separate human fate as the fate of the people in the era of the most severe disasters, to see in this life a huge universal content and meaning. The hero of the story, Andrei Sokolov, is an ordinary person who has survived innumerable torments, captivity. “A military hurricane of unprecedented strength” blew the house, the Sokolov family off the face of the earth, but he did not break. Having met a child, whom the war also deprived of all relatives and friends, he assumed responsibility for his life and upbringing. Through the whole story runs the thought of the anti-human nature of fascism, war, distorting fate, destroying homes. The story about irreparable losses, about terrible grief is permeated with faith in a person, his kindness, mercy, fortitude and prudence. Reflections of the author-narrator, sensitive to someone else's misfortune, endowed with great power of empathy, increase the emotional intensity of the story.

rout- a novel by the Soviet writer Alexander. A. Fadeeva. The novel tells about the history of the partisan red detachment. The events take place in the 1920s during the Civil War in the Ussuri region. The inner world of the main characters of the novel is shown: the commander of the detachment Levinson and the fighters of the detachment Mechik, Morozka, his wife Varya. The partisan detachment (like other detachments) stands in the village and does not conduct combat operations for a long time. People get used to a deceptive calmness. But soon the enemy launches a large-scale offensive, crushing partisan detachments one by one, and a ring of enemies closes around the detachment. The squad leader is doing everything possible to save people and continue the fight. The detachment, pressed against the bog, makes a path and goes along it into the taiga. In the finale, the detachment falls into a Cossack ambush, but, having suffered monstrous losses, breaks through the ring. The novel was written in 1924-1926 by the then little-known writer Alexander Fadeev. The novel "The Rout" is about human relationships, about the difficult conditions in which one must survive, about loyalty to the cause. It is no coincidence that Fadeev chooses to describe in the novel the time when the detachment was already defeated. He wants to show not only the successes of the Red Army, but also its failures. One of the main positive characters of the novel is a man named Levinson. Fadeev made the positive hero of his work a Jew by nationality, in accordance with the internationalism of the 20s.

"Chapaev"- Dmitry Furmanov's novel of 1923 about the life and death of the hero of the civil war division commander Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev. The action takes place in 1919, mainly during the stay of Commissar Fyodor Klychkov in the 25th Chapaev division (the novel directly reflects Furmanov's personal experience as a commissar in Chapaev's division). The battles for Slomikhinskaya, Pilyugino, Ufa, as well as the death of Chapaev in the battle near Lbischensk are described.

For the anniversary of the October Revolution, we remembered the ten most important works of art of that period - from Lissitzky's "Red Wedge to beat the Whites" to Deineka's "Defense of Petrograd".

El Lissitzky,

"Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge"

In the famous poster "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge," El Lissitzky uses Malevich's Suprematist language for political purposes. Pure geometric forms serve as a description of a violent armed conflict. Thus, Lissitzky reduces the immediate event, the action, to a text and a slogan. All elements of the poster are rigidly intertwined with each other and interdependent. Figures lose their absolute freedom and become geometric text: this poster would be read from left to right even without letters. Lissitzky, like Malevich, designed a new world and created forms in which a new life was supposed to fit. This work, thanks to a new form and geometry, translates the topic of the day into some general timeless categories.

Kliment Redko

"Insurrection"

The work of Kliment Redko "Uprising" is the so-called Soviet neo-icon. The idea of ​​this format is that the image printed on a plane is, first of all, a kind of general model, an image of what is desired. As in a traditional icon, the image is not real, but displays a certain perfect world. It is the neoicon that underlies the art of socialist realism in the 1930s.

In this work, Redko dares to take a bold step - in the space of the picture, he combines geometric figures with portraits of Bolshevik leaders. To the right and left of Lenin are his associates - Trotsky, Krupskaya, Stalin and others. As in the icon, there is no familiar perspective here, the scale of a particular figure depends not on its distance from the viewer, but on its significance. In other words, Lenin is the most important here, and therefore the biggest. Redko also attached great importance to light.

The figures seem to emit a glow, which makes the picture look like a neon sign. The artist denoted this technique with the word “cinema”. He sought to overcome the materiality of paint and drew analogies between painting and radio, electricity, cinema and even the northern lights. Thus, he actually sets himself the same tasks that icon painters set themselves many centuries ago. He plays with the schemes familiar to everyone in a new way, replacing Paradise with the socialist world, and Christ and the saints with Lenin and his henchmen. The purpose of Redko's work is the deification and sacralization of the revolution.

Pavel Filonov

"Formula of the Petrograd proletariat"

The Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat was written during the civil war. In the center of the picture is a worker, whose majestic figure towers over a barely visible city. The composition of the painting is built on tense rhythms, creating a feeling of seething and growing movement. All the iconic symbols of the proletariat are captured here, for example, giant human hands - an instrument for transforming the world. At the same time, this is not just a picture, but a generalizing formula that reflects the Universe. Filonov seems to split the world down to the smallest atoms and immediately puts it together, simultaneously looking through both a telescope and a microscope.

The experience of participating in great and at the same time monstrous historical events (the First World War and the revolution) had a huge impact on the artist's work. The people in Filonov's paintings are crushed in the meat grinder of history. His works are difficult to perceive, sometimes painful - the painter endlessly splits the whole, sometimes bringing it to the level of a kaleidoscope. The viewer constantly has to keep in mind all the fragments of the picture in order to eventually catch a holistic image. Filonov's world is the world of the collective body, the world of the concept of "we" put forward by the era, where the private and the personal are abolished. The artist himself considered himself a spokesman for the ideas of the proletariat, and called the collective body, which is always present in his paintings, "the heyday of the world." However, it is possible that even against the will of the author, his "we" is filled with deep horror. In the work of Filonov, the new world appears as a bleak and terrible place where the dead penetrates into the living. The painter's works reflected not so much contemporary events as a premonition of the future - the horrors of the totalitarian regime, repressions.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin

"Petrograd Madonna"

Another name for this painting is "1918 in Petrograd". In the foreground is a young mother with a baby in her arms, in the background - a city where the revolution has just died down - and its inhabitants are getting used to a new life and power. The painting resembles either an icon or a fresco by an Italian Renaissance master.

Petrov-Vodkin interpreted the new era in the context of the new fate of Russia, but with his work he did not seek to completely destroy the entire old world and build a new one on its ruins. He drew plots for paintings in everyday life, but he takes the form for them from past eras. If medieval artists dressed biblical heroes in modern clothes in order to bring them closer to their time, then Petrov-Vodkin does exactly the opposite. He depicts a resident of Petrograd in the image of the Mother of God in order to give the ordinary, everyday plot an unusual significance and, at the same time, timelessness and universality.

Kazimir Malevich

"Peasant's Head"

Kazimir Malevich came to the revolutionary events of 1917 as an accomplished master, who had gone from impressionism, neo-primitivism to his own discovery - Suprematism. Malevich took the revolution ideologically; new people and propagandists of the Suprematist faith were to become members of the UNOVIS art group (“Affirmatives of the New Art”), who wore a bandage in the form of a black square on their sleeves. According to the painter, in the changed world, art had to create its own state and its own world order. The revolution made it possible for avant-garde artists to rewrite all past and future history in such a way as to occupy a central place in it. I must say that in many ways they succeeded, because the art of the avant-garde is one of the main visiting cards of Russia. Despite the programmatic rejection of the pictorial form as obsolete, in the second half of the 1920s the artist turned to figurativeness. He creates works of the peasant cycle, but dates them to 1908-1912. (that is, the period before the "Black Square"), so the rejection of non-objectivity does not look here as a betrayal of one's own ideals. Since this cycle is partly a hoax, the artist appears as a prophet who anticipates future popular unrest and revolution. One of the most noticeable features of this period of his work was the impersonality of people. Instead of faces and heads, their bodies are crowned with red, black and white ovals. From these figures comes, on the one hand, incredible tragedy, on the other, abstract grandeur and heroism. The “Head of a Peasant” resembles sacred images, for example, the icon “Savior the Fiery Eye”. Thus, Malevich creates a new "post-Suprematist icon".

Boris Kustodiev

"Bolshevik"

The name of Boris Kustodiev is associated primarily with bright, colorful paintings depicting the life of the merchants and idyllic festive festivities with characteristic Russian scenes. However, after the coup, the artist turned to revolutionary themes. The painting "Bolshevik" depicts a gigantic peasant in felt boots, a sheepskin coat and a hat; behind him, filling the whole sky, flutters the red banner of the revolution. With a giant step, he passes through the city, and far below, numerous people are swarming. The picture has a sharp poster expressiveness and speaks to the viewer in a very pretentious, direct and even somewhat rude symbolic language. The peasant is, of course, the revolution itself, bursting into the streets. Nothing can stop her, there is no hiding from her, and she will eventually crush and destroy everything in her path.

Kustodiev, despite the grandiose changes in the art world, remained true to his already archaic pictorialism at that time. But, oddly enough, the aesthetics of merchant Russia organically adapted to the needs of the new class. He replaced the recognizable Russian woman with a samovar, symbolizing the Russian way of life, with an equally recognizable man in a padded jacket - a kind of Pugachev. The fact is that in the first and second cases, the artist uses images-symbols that are understandable to anyone.

Vladimir Tatlin

Monument to the III International

Tatlin came up with the idea of ​​the tower back in 1918. It was to become a symbol of the new relationship between art and the state. A year later, the artist managed to get an order for the construction of this utopian building. However, she was destined to remain unfulfilled. Tatlin planned to build a 400-meter tower, which would consist of three glass volumes rotating at different speeds. Outside, they were supposed to encircle two giant spirals of metal. The main idea of ​​the monument was in dynamics, which corresponded to the spirit of the time. In each of the volumes, the artist intended to place premises for the "three powers" - legislative, public and informational. Its shape resembles the famous Tower of Babel from the painting by Pieter Brueghel - only Tatlin's tower, unlike the Tower of Babel, was supposed to serve as a symbol of the reunification of mankind after the world revolution, whose offensive everyone was so passionately waiting for in the first years of Soviet power.

Gustav Klutsis

"Electrification of the whole country"

Constructivism, with more enthusiasm than other avant-garde movements, took responsibility for the rhetoric and aesthetics of power. A vivid example of this is the photo montage of the constructivist Gustav Klutsis, who combined the two most recognizable languages ​​of the era - geometric constructions and the face of the leader. Here, as in many works of the 1920s, it is not the real picture of the world that is reflected, but the organization of reality through the eyes of the artist. The goal is not to show this or that event, but to show how the viewer should perceive this event.

Photography played a huge role in the state propaganda of that time, and photomontage was an ideal means of influencing the masses, a product that in the new world was to replace painting. Unlike the same picture, it can be reproduced countless times, placed in a magazine or on a poster, and thus conveyed to a huge audience. Soviet montage is created for the sake of mass reproduction, man-made here is abolished by a huge circulation. Socialist art excludes the concept of uniqueness, it is nothing more than a factory for the production of things and very specific ideas that must be assimilated by the masses.

David Shterenberg

"Curdled milk"

David Shterenberg, although he was a commissar, was not a radical in art. He realized his minimalist decorative style primarily in still lifes. The main technique of the artist is a tabletop slightly upturned vertically with flat objects on it. Bright, decorative, very applicative and fundamentally “superficial” still lifes were perceived in Soviet Russia as truly revolutionary, overturning the old way of life. However, the ultimate flatness here is combined with incredible tactility - almost always painting imitates a particular texture or material. Pictures depicting modest, and sometimes meager food, show the modest, and sometimes meager diet of the proletarians. Shterenberg places the main emphasis on the form of the table, which in a certain sense becomes a reflection of the culture of the cafe with its openness and exposure to the show. The loud and pathetic slogans of a new way of life captured the artist much less.

Alexander Deineka

"Defense of Petrograd"

The painting is divided into two tiers. The lower one depicts fighters briskly marching to the front, and the wounded returning from the battlefield at the top. Deineka uses the technique of reverse movement - first the action develops from left to right, and then from right to left, which creates a feeling of a cyclical composition. Full of determination, male and female figures are written out powerfully and very voluminously. They personify the readiness of the proletariat to go to the end, no matter how long it takes - since the composition of the picture is closed, it seems that the flow of people going to the front and returning
with him, does not dry out. In the hard, inexorable rhythm of the work, the heroic spirit of the era is expressed and the pathos of the civil war is romanticized.

"Cavalry" by I. E. Babel is a collection of short stories related to the theme of the civil war and the narrator in a single way. The stories from this book began to be published in 1923. Different in material, they painted a new and unexpected world. Fate decreed that, having accepted the revolution with its bewitching passion and gone into it, Babel begins to print his stories and correspondence in the St. Petersburg newspaper " New life”, which is facilitated by M. Gorky. But then, perhaps one of the first, he saw in the revolution a break in life, a break in history. Babel was aware of all this as a fracture of being. This sense of truth led Babel to the paths of war. In July 1920, he voluntarily went to the front, to the First Cavalry Army.

Babel came to the front as a correspondent for the newspaper "Red Cavalryman" Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov. Moving with parts, he kept a diary. Reading it, one cannot fail to notice that Babel was stunned: new impressions came into sharp conflict with his life experience. He saw something that he could not even think about: the troops and the Cossacks were serving with their equipment, with their horses and edged weapons. Separated from the army, the Cossacks were forced to feed themselves and provide themselves with horses at the expense of the local population, which often led to bloody incidents. They gave vent to their fatigue, anarchism, arrogance, disregard for the dignity of other people. Violence has become commonplace.

Babel saw in the soldiers their immaturity, lack of culture, rudeness, and it was hard for him to imagine how the ideas of revolution would germinate in the minds of these people. And, judging by the diary, a painful question arose in Babel’s soul: “Why do I have an unending longing?” And the answer was: “Because we are far from home, because we are destroying, we are going like a whirlwind, like lava ... life is flying apart, I am at a big ongoing memorial service.” The stories of Cavalry were based on the entries made by Babel in his diary. V The collection opens with the story "Crossing the Zbruch". The joy of victory from the capture of Novgorod-Volynsk is, as it were, emphasized by the joy of nature itself: “Fields of purple poppy bloom around us, the midday wind plays in the yellowing rye, virgin buckwheat rises on the horizon ...” And then: “the orange sun rolls across the sky, like a chopped off head", and the "gentle light", which "lights up in the gorges of the clouds", can no longer remove the disturbing anxiety. Pictures of victory acquire unusual cruelty. And then: "The smell of yesterday's blood of the killed horses drips into the evening coolness" - this phrase will "overturn" the whole triumphant chant of the story.

All this prepared the finale of the story: the sleeping Jewish neighbor was brutally stabbed to death. In the story “Letter”, Vasily Kurdyukov, a fighter of the First Cavalry, almost a boy, dictates a letter to his mother, in which he tells how his brother Senka “finished” the “dad” of the White Guard, who in turn “finished” his own son Fedya. And this is the truth of the civil war, when fathers and children become sworn enemies and without.

In the story “Salt”, Balmashev Nikita, in a letter to the editor, describes how he let a woman with a child into the car with the cavalrymen going to the front, and protected her from violence from her comrades, and when he found out that instead of a child she was carrying salt, he threw it away from the car and shot: "... I washed this shame from the face of the working land and the republic."

Babel describes heroism, just as spontaneous, but necessary in these conditions. The squadron commander Trunov, violating the charter, arbitrarily and cruelly cracked down on prisoners of war and immediately, together with a soldier, remains behind a machine gun in order to distract enemy aircraft from the squadron hiding in the forest.

On the grave of the “world hero Pasha Trunov”, the regiment commander Pugachev “shouted a speech about the dead soldiers from the First Cavalry, about this proud phalanx, hammering history on the anvil of future centuries” (“Squadron Trunov”). Focusing on the ordinary participants in the events, Babel says very little about the true leaders of the First Cavalry, who tamed this elemental freemen and turned it into an organized force. However, Babel does not hide his admiration for the commander Savitsky, whose prototype was the legendary Tymoshenko.

In all the stories of Cavalry there is the presence of the author himself, who, together with its heroes, went through a difficult path to comprehend the meaning of this bloody struggle. In the descriptions of events there is a cruel truth of the mighty bloody stream of life.

For an attempt to truthfully describe the events of the civil war, Babel was accused of "anti-Soviet conspiratorial terrorist activities ..." and in 1939 he was arrested, and in 1940 he was shot.